He said he has tried to change his driving style to that of Lewis because the car works best that way. It's about taking less smooth lines and braking. It's what the team has expected him to do. It is not a fair situation to assess a driver's talent level.

change to the style of Lewis, I think you're leaving something out there because it was also reported at the same time, LEWIS had to change his style as well.

I always wanted to hear Heikki's perspective on things and well it isn't much different from what I thought. In fact its like open secret I guess.

Seems like there is not point for any driver to go to mcLaren. If this is gonna be the norm from 2010 and onwards then I hope Kimi doesn't goes there, prolly goto WRC or whatever.

So I still hold onto my line that I'd like to see Heikki in some other team without pressures etc. I'd just want to see how he performs in some other team with a reasonably good car underneath him, with which he feels that he can perform and then see if really heikki is the most disappointing talent in F1 history. Well i'm not really a fan of this give but hey giving him another chance won't hurt.

If mcLaren really want to go with this 1 and 2 thingy then I'd say bring in Heidfeld. I wouldn't want to see Kimi's end of career like Alonso left and Heikki is crying now.

change to the style of Lewis, I think you're leaving something out there because it was also reported at the same time, LEWIS had to change his style as well.

This has been said several times in this thread. So how exactly did Lewis have to change his style?

Heikki Kovalainen has told about his struggles in changing his driving style to suit the MP4-24 several times in the Finnish newspapers. Here's the most recent account from 30.10.2009 (in Finnish), after Kovalainen has told the reporter that his car feels better at Abu Dhabi than in some previous tracks, but Kovalainen tells that he's still not entirely happy with the car. (My translation.)

"It is about the concept of the whole car -- weight distribution and mechanical balance, the whole aerobalance is such that braking should be done in a straight line. I cannot drive into a corner and use the brake at the same time, because that would lock the wheels.

This works now just the opposite way to the kind of car that I got used to when I was driving with Michelin tyres. With those I could drive into corners really fast. Now the car must be run in a straight line, to pace off, then go slowly through the corner and accelerate out again. All the time you need to think about what you are doing, and I cannot drive the way that comes to me naturally."

I always wanted to hear Heikki's perspective on things and well it isn't much different from what I thought. In fact its like open secret I guess.

Seems like there is not point for any driver to go to mcLaren. If this is gonna be the norm from 2010 and onwards then I hope Kimi doesn't goes there, prolly goto WRC or whatever.

So I still hold onto my line that I'd like to see Heikki in some other team without pressures etc. I'd just want to see how he performs in some other team with a reasonably good car underneath him, with which he feels that he can perform and then see if really heikki is the most disappointing talent in F1 history. Well i'm not really a fan of this give but hey giving him another chance won't hurt.

If mcLaren really want to go with this 1 and 2 thingy then I'd say bring in Heidfeld. I wouldn't want to see Kimi's end of career like Alonso left and Heikki is crying now.

Heikki Kovalainen's answers in the original interview seem quite honest to me, but I don't think he's bitter or trying to attack his own team. The F1-Live.com just picked the juiciest parts from the answers and left out the questions altogether. Actually, the Finnish newspaper reporter was asking pretty provocative questions, obviously trying to make Kovalainen to take a defensive position and give answers that would make great headlines. And, to some degree, the reporter succeeded. I'll translate here the questions from the original newspaper interview:

Question 1:"During the current season you've gathered only half as much points as your team mate. So it seems rather useless to even ask if you're happy with your season?"

Question 2:"Is the problem in the driver or in the car?"

Question 3:"You say that you're a better driver now than in 2008. Yet, last year you won one Grand Prix, and this year you haven't even been on the podium?"

Question 4:"You have often blamed tyres for your failures. Are they really the only reason?"

Question 5:"A year ago you complained that your team mate Lewis Hamilton has always less fuel at the start of the race, and you were going to demand that this must change. Apparently nothing has changed?"

Question 6:"So you're the wingman in the team?"

Question 7:"Another sign that you've been made to play the second fiddle is that Lewis is always the first to get new parts for his car?"

Question 8:"But wouldn't it have been better for your career if you had complained in a loud voice?"

Question 9:"Do you already have a new manager to negotiate about your future options, now that Flavio Briatore has been banned forever from Formula One?"

Question 10:"How long can you wait?"

Question 11:"Do you still believe in your chances to continue at McLaren?"

I always wanted to hear Heikki's perspective on things and well it isn't much different from what I thought. In fact its like open secret I guess.

Seems like there is not point for any driver to go to mcLaren. If this is gonna be the norm from 2010 and onwards then I hope Kimi doesn't goes there, prolly goto WRC or whatever.

So I still hold onto my line that I'd like to see Heikki in some other team without pressures etc. I'd just want to see how he performs in some other team with a reasonably good car underneath him, with which he feels that he can perform and then see if really heikki is the most disappointing talent in F1 history. Well i'm not really a fan of this give but hey giving him another chance won't hurt.

If mcLaren really want to go with this 1 and 2 thingy then I'd say bring in Heidfeld. I wouldn't want to see Kimi's end of career like Alonso left and Heikki is crying now.

There IS a point to go McLaren if you want to finish your career with some wins and podiums.

It's like Fisi, isn't it? A lot of people would say Fisi has been a disappointing talent. Heikki can go to another team where there's no pressure and beat his teammate, but he remains not good enough for a top team.

Alonso is going to Ferrari. The fiasco at McLaren is not as damaging to his reputation as what happened to Kimi at Ferrari.

But the issue was that there is an expectation that all Finns are future championship material, and so he was hyped up. And he happened to be at the right time, at the right team to be swapped with Alonso.

Heikki was never supposed to be the next Schumacher, but he was considered a true talent when he dominated the GP2 series before ART fixed it for Rosberg. For me it seems that Heikki needs to step down from Maclaren and understand that sometimes to get two steps ahead, you have to take one backwards. If he'd get a nice breath of fresh air in a smaller team and would start building his reputation from scratch, I think he could very well be able to deliver in few years.

I would reckon much the same way its said that Heikki has or expected to.

McLaren told both drivers to drive like this as their calculations have told them this is the optimum way

Hamilton was told to do it in 2007, too

A quote in this weeks Autosport suggests that the concerns that some of us raised about how he will be treated may be well justified. A McLaren spokesman (interestingly not Ron Dennis) has confirmed that McLaren do not want the problems of the past couple of years where they had to run two cars with very different set-ups. Their proposed solution is to get Hamilton to change his driving style to match Alonso's on the basis that "he is young and everything he learns is good" so he can adapt without difficulty.

Never heard that before Darth, pretty big, pretty damming on the Alonso was disadvantaged talk

Found it with a basic Google search that references an Autosport article. Tbh I remember reading something like this around the time, possibly in the print version, but failed to uncover it. Then I Google searched and found this;

edit; Perhaps if a collector has an issue of the print mag from around 22 Jan 2007 they might be able to shed some further light on this - unfortunately I don't tend to keep them longer than a year, sorry.

Look at Mika Häkkinen in the McLaren team. He spent 1993-1996 in the team without winning anything.

Heikki has won a Grand Prix in his 2nd year in F1. Mika won in his 7th year in F1. If we look at this in this simplistic way, Heikki Kovalainen has achieved more success than Mika Häkkinen did in his first few years in the sport.

Sure, the McLaren in Mika's early years in the team was not relatively as good as the one Heikki has had. But still, you need to put this thing into some perspective - really, Heikki has been more succesful in F1 than Mika Häkkinen if we look at what they achieved in the first few years in the sport.

Sure, he should have achieved more when looking at what his team-mate achieved, no doubt about that, but you could also take this different angle to this and say he is already more succesful in F1 than Mika Häkkinen was in the same time. Heikki will have many more years in F1 to try and achieve what Mika did eventually: win a Championship.

Heikki, just keep trying, there are a lot of people out there who believe in you and think you should not give up. So don't! If it requires you to start over in some other team then that's what you have to do, don't let it bring you down one bit but take it as an opportunity to improve yourself even further as a race driver and as a person.

Alonso only became disadvantaged when he took the huff. I remember defending McLaren early in the 2007 season against accusations that they were holding Hamilton back intentinally to help Alonso.

(A bit OT so sorry in advance.)I don't still fully understand how Alonso lost so little reputation after losing to a rookie, but it's mostly down to the ferocious campaign started by the Spanish press. Through the years everybody knew the F1 press exaggerated some things, but Spanish reporters didn't even know what F1 was at that time. When the Spanish campaign started, I think people following F1 were just not used to blatant and consistent lies, stories with made up quotes, stories out of a vacuum (as opposed to thin air) and F1 reporters who don't know even the basics of the sport. I mean, if you have dozens of magazines repeating something every day for months, there must be some truth to it, right? There wasn't, but it worked. Let's see if they are able to do it again if Alonso doesn't beat Massa.

I can hardly remember a single race in the Mclaren that has been inspiring. Even his win was gifted FFS.
The only good race I can remember is Fuji 07 when he was driving a Renault. The rest has been a big fiasco.

(A bit OT so sorry in advance.)I don't still fully understand how Alonso lost so little reputation after losing to a rookie, but it's mostly down to the ferocious campaign started by the Spanish press. Through the years everybody knew the F1 press exaggerated some things, but Spanish reporters didn't even know what F1 was at that time. When the Spanish campaign started, I think people following F1 were just not used to blatant and consistent lies, stories with made up quotes, stories out of a vacuum (as opposed to thin air) and F1 reporters who don't know even the basics of the sport. I mean, if you have dozens of magazines repeating something every day for months, there must be some truth to it, right? There wasn't, but it worked. Let's see if they are able to do it again if Alonso doesn't beat Massa.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."Joseph Goebbels

I'm still mystified as to why Zanardi didn't continue to crush all before him.Bourdais had to deal with Vettel, Buemi, Tost ... that's how I'll rationalize that mystery.Andretti. Big surprise. Bitter disappointment. At least the extensive analysis of the subject is a comfort.

But the one I'll never understand is ...

Mark Donohue.

Imagine yourself inside the Argentinean racing scene in the late forties. You KNOW how good Fangio is. You KNOW he will beat all comers in Europe. That's the certainty we in North America had about Donohue. No hubris from his fans. Just an awareness that sooner or later this tsunami called Mark Donohue will hit the shore and that will be that. But it wasn't. We were wrong. Huh...

Look at Mika Häkkinen in the McLaren team. He spent 1993-1996 in the team without winning anything.

Heikki has won a Grand Prix in his 2nd year in F1. Mika won in his 7th year in F1. If we look at this in this simplistic way, Heikki Kovalainen has achieved more success than Mika Häkkinen did in his first few years in the sport.

Sure, the McLaren in Mika's early years in the team was not relatively as good as the one Heikki has had. But still, you need to put this thing into some perspective - really, Heikki has been more succesful in F1 than Mika Häkkinen if we look at what they achieved in the first few years in the sport.

Sure, he should have achieved more when looking at what his team-mate achieved, no doubt about that, but you could also take this different angle to this and say he is already more succesful in F1 than Mika Häkkinen was in the same time. Heikki will have many more years in F1 to try and achieve what Mika did eventually: win a Championship.

Heikki, just keep trying, there are a lot of people out there who believe in you and think you should not give up. So don't! If it requires you to start over in some other team then that's what you have to do, don't let it bring you down one bit but take it as an opportunity to improve yourself even further as a race driver and as a person.

Sorry, but Mika from the very beginning, you could tell he had something special. he trounced his teammate Herbert at Lotus taking that car to loftier hights it had no business in being at, and at McLAren, he immediately outqualified Senna and a race later he scored a podim. He made the most of the 1994 McLaren with that Timebomb that was the Peugeot, scoring podiums when he shouldn't have. He even managed to score podiums in what was the worst McLaren car ever produced in 1995. Even when he was injured, he came back just as fast and just as capable, and everyone could tell he just needed the right car to finally launch. And he got it.

Heikki so far hasn't even shown anything inspiring to even think that he deserves a seat in F1. Every time I've seen it, he's been trounced by Hamilton left right and center, and can't even do jackshit with the car no matter what strategy he had. His only win was even inherited. He's really disappointed me, and IMO, he should make room for someone else that's more capable, because he clearly doesn't have it.